South Africa, February 19, Day 2.

Today was our wine tasting day! There were 6 of us: Kayla, Jojo, Katelyn, Melissa, Roland, and myself.  Kayla studied abroad in Cape Town before, so she had a contact that was going to meet us and drive us around for the day. His name was Al, and he had a friend named Mike with him. They were both older men that lived in a colored township. I loved talking to them about growing up in district 6, and being forced to leave. District 6 was a township that the government (during apartheid) pretty much bulldozed in order to build a white neighborhood. They never actually got around to building, so they destroyed thousands of homes for nothing. Today, the government is re-building houses and allowing the people that lived there before to move back, but Al and Mike both said that a lot of people won’t go back. “Too much hurt,” they said.  I got a lot of our talk on video, and I still get chills when I watch it.
We drove for about an hour to our first winery, Neethlingshof. We sat inside and tasted 6 different wines. I didn’t know anything about wine, and I still don’t. I do know, however, that I do not like red wine! Not a fan at all. My favorite wine was the first one we tried. It was fruity and nice. After we tasted all our wines, we went out and had a little photo shoot with the beautiful mountains in the back. The Stellenbosch area that we were in was absolutely beautiful. Our drivers then took us to the next place, Asara. We only had an hour because we wanted to get to the third place before it closed, so we felt a bit rushed. This place was SO beautiful! The mountains in the back and the lake and the green grass… everything about this place was amazing. We tasted only three wines here because of time, but I loved all three.  We bought some chocolates here too.
Finally we made our way to the last place, where we planned on eating dinner. Our driver told us that they had an animal park here, and we could pet cheetahs! Of course we jumped on this opportunity! We got there and immediately headed to the Cheetah park. We paid a small fee and got to meet a Cheetah named Chobe (Cho-bee). He was the youngest in the park, but the largest. He was so calm, and purred when we pet him. We got some amazing pictures of us petting Chobe, then made our way over to the restaurant. On the walk over, there were these little stands selling handmade crafts. A lot of the stuff was really cool! I bought a gift for my mom (sorry mom, can’t tell you what it is yet! Hahah) that I think she will LOVE. We stopped every two seconds to take pictures… the beauty of this place is incredible. 
When we finally got to the restaurant, we decided it was too expensive, so we had Al and Mike take us to this place that Kayla knew called The Africa Café.  This place reminded me a little of  this place that my mom and I eat at at home, called the Gypsy Café… only on a bigger scale. It had a small feel to it,  but it was three stories high. It was decorated in beautiful art made with all recycled materials. The windows were just open windows that they rolled plastic canvases over when it got too windy (which it does SO often in Cape Town!)  It was beautiful and nice, but in a rustic kind of way. The menu had about 15 things on it, but you didn’t order. They just brought you everything on the menu, asked what you liked, and then brought you more.  We were there for probably two or three hours, trying all the food and talking about how perfect our day had been.
We finally decided it was time to walk back to the ship. We had no idea how far it was or where we were going, but we really didn’t care. It was a beautiful night, windy and a little chilly, and we were all in dresses, so the walk back was so fun. We went the wrong way for a while, took a lot of wrong turns, walked with our hands pressed to our sides so that our dresses didn’t fly away, and laughed the entire way back.  There is a huge Ferris wheel at the waterfront, so we kept walking until we could see it, then turned to walk in that direction. After about an hour, we finally found the ship, got ready really fast, and headed back out to meet up with other friends. There is a bar at the end of the waterfront that was pretty popular with SAS kids called Mitchell’s. This was usually the meeting point, where everyone met and hung out and then got cabs to whatever club was popular for that night. I was exhausted though, and just went back to the ship after hanging out at Mitchell’s for a while.  This was the most perfect day, and only further confirmed the fact that I was falling in love with South Africa.